Save our shearwaters

Europe’s rarest seabird is the Balearic shearwater (Puffinus mauretanicus), which breeds in the Mediterranean and migrates north into the Atlantic in the summer. It is seen increasingly off Britain with perhaps ¼ of the world population visibly using our seas at times in late summer. But it is critically endangered, and faces as a species a deeply uncertain future because of threats from fisheries by-catch and climate change at sea, and predation pressure and human disturbance at the breeding colonies. Despite this, still remarkably little is known about its behaviour and ecological needs: knowledge which must underpin conservation efforts to avert its extinction.

At Oxford a team led by Tim Guilford is collaborating with scientists at the National Oceanographic Centre in Southampton, and with Spanish and UK conservationists to try to fill important knowledge gaps and raise awareness of the species’ plight. Using state-of-the-art miniature tracking technologies, we are tackling fundamental questions about where and how breeding birds feed (and how this relates to human fisheries), where they overwinter, and their patterns of colony use in the pre-breeding months. We are now trying to determine the provenance of birds using UK waters, which we think may be non- or pre-breeders becoming increasingly dependent on our waters as the changing climate drives important marine resources north. And we are setting up longer term monitoring efforts to help assess key changes in breeding success, overwinter survival, and the patterns of breeding and migration.